Without God, Without Creed Part VII

 Man the Measure of God

In the post-Christian West, Christendom lies broke in the temples of Baal.  What place, then, is left to Christians and the Church of our Lord?  Terry Eagleton, writing in the New Statesman gives us a succinct description of tolerable Christianity in our modern secular world.

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere, not just when church attendance drops or Roman Catholics mysteriously become childless, that secularisation proper sets in. Like art and sexuality, religion is taken out of public ownership and gradually privatised. It dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain. As the cynic remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up. In this respect, it has a curious affinity with alcohol: it, too, can drive you mad.

Dwindling to a kind of personal, private pastime.  Christendom is indeed broke.   But, as Theoden wondered, "How did it come to this?"  James Turner, in his very helpful book, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) goes a long way to answering Theoden's question.


As the Scripture and redemptive history reveals--repeatedly, just so we dummies will get the point--defalcation begins at home.  Unbelief begins in the hearts and minds of God's people first.  When a society is christianised--as the West was until the Enlightenment--the shekeinah glory cloud begins to withdraw when God's people themselves start to entertain idolatrous beliefs about God, then eventually welcome idols themselves.  Turner gets this point.  He argues that Unbelief became eventually powerful in the West because first believers and church leaders started thinking, acting, and writing as if they were themselves Unbelievers.  In large part this came about because the Church wanted to make itself hip, using precepts and principles which would appeal to the pagans amongst them.

Following Turner's argument, we have traced how the Church agreed that, despite what the Scriptures so clearly reveal, the creation was separate from the Creator.  Next, it became independent of the Creator.  Then, the Creation (man) became sovereign over the Creator. God was made to kneel beneath the bar of human conceptions, rules, morals, and beliefs.  Since man did not like what he saw, God was dismissed.  This process of intellectual and spiritual defalcation took three centuries to work through and out.  But it has led us to where Eagleton describes we are today.

The next stage in the dismantling of Christendom that reached the crucial tipping point in the latter part of the nineteenth century was for Unbelief to assert that the God revealed in the Scriptures was evil.  Calling evil good, and good evil is the mark of a God cursed generation--and so it came to pass.


Man's conception of "good" because some autonomous and self-referent, that God was pronounced evil--because there was suffering in the world.  God was not acting like a sensitive Victorian sentimental humanitarianism.

Belief in God seemed not merely implausible but blasphemous  In a world of pain, no humanitarian could with entire comfort worship its Creator.  This dilemma had become, by the later nineteenth century, especially excruciating.  Many believers had attributed to God their concern to ease human suffering; church leadres had joined in divinizing humanitarianism.  And now the very principles thus sanctified turned on their baptizers.  God became the victim of those who insisted on His human tenderness.
James Turner, op cit., p. 207.

 God was evil, according to the lights of man.  Every so often this pours forth again.  Consider how the New Atheists of our day have insisted that the God of Scripture is immoral and evil because He commanded the extermination of the Canaanites, or the sacrifice of Isaac.  They are continuing to read from the playbook of sentimental Victorians.   They remain oblivious to the ludicrousness of their cant.  Clinging to a Victorian sentimentality they conjure up moral principles that their atheism cannot warrant.

But we digress.  Like the proverbial hominid finally standing on this own two feet, the Victorian Unbeliever developed to where to accept anything on "authority" was anti-human.  It undermined the moral integrity of what it meant to be human.  At this point, the idolatry is maturing into the deification of man himself.  "You will be like gods . . ." hissed the serpent.  Yes, we are gods in our own right, was the antiphonal response by the end of the nineteenth century.

But for some Victorians, the autonomy of the inner self was so precious--and so precarious--that submission to any external authority, even God, potentially endangered the moral integrity of the person. . . . (M)ore fundamentally, there seems to have been an uneasiness about looking to a God as source of right and wrong, rather than making those decisions for oneself--unwillingness to countenance any ultimate authority in the universe.  Samuel Putnam clearly articulated this position and so concluded that "to vindicate liberty I must dethrone God."
Ibid., p. 211. 

As Unbelief matured, the next phase was to proclaim that Unbelievers were the true heroes of the world.  Christians and believers in the Living God were lazy, cowardly, and facile, gulled by easy superstitions.  The lions of the world were those who faced up to all of the perplexities of the world and faced up to the "hard questions".  And those who faced up to realities were on the cutting edge of human progress.  The courageous Unbeliever starts to take on a messianic mantle in the Temple of Baal.

Religious belief (Christianity) was a retardant to the fire of human progress.  Religion stopped a person "thinking clearly" and unflinchingly.  It represented mere wishful thinking.

Indulgence in myths, fantasies about the unseen hearkened back to the Dark Ages.  man had taken centuries to climb into the light.  Belief in God blasphemed against that achievement and obstructed the ascent that remained.  Ibid. p. 220.

God is anti-human.  Christianity is anti-human.

As noted above, Turner argues that the Church had led the Victorian period into this blasphemy.  He summarises how this had come about:

Responding to the pressures of modernity over the past two centuries, church leaders had increasingly chosen to make religion conform to the needs and demands of the modern world, rather than to try to understand that world in relation to a God outside of history and beyond human wishes. This strategy aimed to keep religion on top of social change, and one of its results was naturally a closer focus on worldly behaviour; that is, a moralization of religion.  Specifically, nineteenth-century theologians and ministers, ignoring warnings from dissenters, attributed to God the humanitarian and progressive ideals of their age.  At the same time, they defined belief in intellectual terms inherited from Enlightenment religion, analogous to the powerful world view of modern science. . . . Above all, church leaders had come to insist that God must be moral--and not on His own terms, whatever those might be, but in humanly understandable ones.
Ibid., p. 222.  Emphasis, ours.

God before the bar of human sentiment and reason.  Idolatry in full throat.

There was one last step to take to break down Christendom fully.  The precise shape and form of the idol of Victorianism awaiting unveiling.  We will attend the ceremony in our next and final post in this series.